Recently in Film Category
Local spots are easy to poke fun at, given their usual level of sophistication and technical acumen, but sometimes, rarely, somebody hits a home run.
Viceland is running a long interview with the God of the Wire. Go read the whole thing. Some choice bits:
This seems to play into what you mentioned earlier, that you were writing Greek tragedy, which certainly had comedic elements.
Yes. Before finishing the first season I’d reread most of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, those three guys. I’d read some of it in college, but I hadn’t read it systematically. That stuff is incredibly relevant today. As drama, the actual plays are a little bit stilted, but the message within the plays and the dramatic impulses are profound for our time. We don’t really realize it. I don’t think we sense the power in there because we’re really more in the Shakespearean construct of—
Yes, the individualism kind of thing.
The individual and the interior struggle for self. Macbeth and Hamlet and Lear and Othello. These are the great tragedies—the dramatic branch that leads to O’Neill and our modern theater. But I saw a version of Aeschylus’s The Persians done on the stage in Washington, and it made my jaw drop. They put it on during the height of the insurgency in Iraq—after that misadventure in Iraq had made itself apparent. If you read that play and if you saw this production of it, it was so dead-on. I don’t know if you know the play.
I’ve never read it, but I know what it’s about.
It’s basically the people back in the Persian capital wondering what’s happened to their army and, of course, bad things have happened to their army. And the young emperor who wants to be compared to his father—it’s Darius the Great, I think—he wants to win the victory that was denied his father over the Greeks.
Sounds familiar.
Yeah. And of course they performed it in Republican ties and suits. It was a Washington audience. I was watching it and I was looking around, and some of these lines were landing, some of the dialogue was landing. I was looking around like, “Did everyone just catch that? Did they really just say that?” It was so ripe in its critique of Bush and Cheney and all those guys.
It seems to me that people want to be sort of special, unique snowflakes, and the Shakespearean thing addresses that more.
Right! Let’s celebrate me and the wonder that is me. It’s not about society. The Greeks, especially the Athenians, were consumed with questions about man and state. They gave Socrates hemlock because his ideas were antithetical to their notions of state.
Listen, that’s totalitarianism in any sense, but for him, he was cynical about democracy and he was an iconoclast about the democratic principles. That went to the heart of Greek thinking. It was like, “Don’t fuck with that.” Now, the thing that has been exalted and the thing that American entertainment is consumed with is the individual being bigger than the institution. How many frickin’ times are we gonna watch a story where somebody—
Rises up against the odds?
“You can’t do that.” “Yes, I can.” “No, you can’t.” “I’ll show you, see?” And in the end he’s recognized as just a goodhearted rebel with right on his side, and eventually the town realizes that dancing’s not so bad. I can make up a million of ’em. That’s the story we want to be told over and over again. And you know why? Because in our heart of hearts what we know about the 21st century is that every day we’re going to be worth less and less, not more and more.
Worth less and less as people, you mean?
As human beings. Some of us are going to get more money and be worth more. There are some people who are destined for celebrity or wealth or power, but by and large, the average American, the average person in the world on planet earth, is worth less and less. That’s the triumph of capital, and that is the problem. You look at that, and you think that’s what we’ve come to and that’s where we’re going and it’s like, “Can you tell me another bedtime story about how people are special and every one of us matters? Can you tell me that shit?”
And, later, on the supposed divide between literary fiction, crime writing, and how the Wire relates thereto:
Everybody should write the stories that matter to them and then we’ll figure it out once everything exists.
Word. God Save David Simon.
Space: 1970: "This blog is dedicated to the science fiction films and television series of the 1970s - and very early 80s - including such nostalgic favorites as Star Wars, Space: 1999, UFO, Space Academy, the original Battlestar Galactica, Jason of Star Command, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Logan's Run and many others."
His coverage of Ark II is particularly fine. I hadn't realized that the jetpack they used was an actual, working Bell prototype.
Team Edward FTW!
Given the trendline between 1970s-era disaster movies like Airport and The Towering Inferno -- localized, but still awful, events -- and recent world-ending films like Knowing and 2012, what will the Michael Bays of the future do to up the ante in the years to come?
Do not miss this.
The 100 Greatest Quotes from the Wire. They may not be YOUR favorites, but they're fine ones no matter what. Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. Also, the king stay the king.
This silent-movie, Chaplinesque version of the Matrix isn't quite perfect, but it's worth passing on anyway.
So, we missed the first ep of Big Bang Theory for whatever reason, and wanted to catch up before watching episode two. We checked Hulu and iTunes and found nada, but managed to snag a torrent in about half an hour.
It occurs to me that it might've been on CBS.com, but network-based streams have been, in my experience, even more fail-filled than Hulu. I checked anyway: it's clips only, so apparently CBS' opinion is that if I miss an episode, I should just wait until they deign to show it again.
Um, fuck that. I long for the days when TV producers actually understand how data works. Let the record show that we tried to buy it before resorting to torrents. Sigh.
The Coen Brothers are remaking the classic John Wayne film True Grit -- or, rather, making another film from the same source, Charles Portis' 1968 novel of the same name.
An old episode of Cold Case is on at the Sheraton; the plotline is about a murdered schoolteacher during the Red Scare, as recounted by his paramour.
Said paramour is played by Ellen Geer. Geer is the daughter of Will Geer, better known as Grandpa Walton, and himself a victim of McCarthy-era blacklisting.
Sadly for Heathen-aged people, Ellen is nearly 70, so she is the "old" daughter of an actor I only knew as an "old" man in the 70s, but she is about as old as her father was as Zebulon Walton in the 1970s.
By the way, the whole Red Scare? Architected by the GOP.
Universal is apparently making a big-screen re-reboot of Battlestar Galactica -- with Bryan Singer attached -- that will share essentially none of the lore from the groundbreaking, award-winning TV reboot.
It's really hard to understand this as anything but a craven attempt to mine geek wallets. Of course, that's what the original BSG was in the 70s -- it debuted in the wake of Star Wars' huge success -- so I guess in some ways this is just a return to form.
The new Where The Wild Things Are trailer looks even better than the first one.
Sincerely, John Hughes. Teenager Alison Byrne Fields wrote a fan letter to Hughes in 1985, and they ended up pen pals.
This is all over the Net, but I'm sure enough that more people need to see it that I'm running it, too. I got it from JWZ. There's also a follow-up.
Dead.
The director of iconic 80s coming-of-age films had a heart attack on his morning walk. He was 59.
This is an excellent time to note how prolific he actually was; while he's well known for directing Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), and Ferris Beuller's Day Off (1986), he also wrote National Lampoon's Vacation (1983) (and, sadly, its sequels), Pretty in Pink (1986), and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), among others. The Heathen Generation's youth wouldn't have been the same without him.
Save Ferris.
The 21st Street Mission run by Edith Keeler in "The City On The Edge Of Forever" has got to be the cleanest homeless shelter ever.
"He can speak French. In Russian."
This Star Wars fan-remake hinges on a great idea: split it into 472 15-second bits, and have random folks sign up to make a segment. So far, 24 are finished.
Brit sketch comedy on homeopaths:
Amber Benson and Ron Jeremy star in One Eyed Monster.
No, really. Watch the trailer. Probably NSFW though.
Ebert on Transformers 2 is a wonderful thing. He opens with:
"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
More:
The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.
Carrie Fisher and her double sunbathe on the set of Return of the Jedi. And yes, in the iconic outfits.
Cameron's house is for sale. Stop, look around, and have $2.3 million, and you won't miss a thing. Particulars: 5,300 square feet in two buildings; 4 bedrooms, 4 full baths, and incredible views.
Enjoy.
Lorenzo Llamas and Debbie Gibson star in Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus:
Quoth Will: "I genuinely don't know whether to shit or go blind." True, Will, true. Direct to DVD on May 19. Who's with me?
On a Saturday. During an Alabama game:
Stay with it 'til the end.
Treme, David Simon's new show about New Orleans post-Katrina, has been picked up by HBO.
Dom DeLouise is dead; I'm not sure what shocks me more: that he's dead, or that he was seventy five. Something else I learned from the obit: He was in Fail-Safe.
Here he is with Dean Martin in a sketch that was apparently much, much funnier at the time. On the other hand, the outtakes from Cannonball Run are still hilarious. (Which reminds us of this delightful and perfect homage from The State.)
A California woman decided to have a bit of fun with her ten-year high school reunion, so she hired a stripper to impersonate her as a struggling artist trailed by a film crew working on a "documentary" while she watched from a nearby hotel room and fed the imposter names and anecdotes via a hidden earpiece to sell the scheme.
FanTAStic. She's shopping the whole thing as a film now.
Via Siege, we find the sad tale of an insane penguin, narrated (naturally) by Werner Herzog. (2:27 Youtube)
Moon, as it stars Sam Rockwell.
Turns out, if you ignore threats to your business model with halfassed responses to innovation on multiple fronts, well, you just may end up screwed.
MTV's The State may finally hit DVD this summer.
Bad news from Mrs Heathen: Andy Hallett, the actor behind the green-skinned lounge owner Lorne on "Angel," died yesterday of a heart ailment. He was 33.
It's apparently time for the obligatory where are they now stories. Turns out one of 'em died of a brain tumor already. Wacky.
A New Sith is an amusing analysis of the original three Star Wars films in light of the information and connections given to us by the prequel trilogy. Viewed carefully, the new films support some surprising conclusions; one of the author's main conclusions:
If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.
Consider: at the end of RotS, Bail Organan orders 3PO's memory wiped but not R2's. He wouldn't make the distinction casually. Both droids know that Yoda and Obi-Wan are alive and are plotting sedition with the Senator from Alderaan. They know that Amidala survived long enough to have twins and could easily deduce where they went. However, R2 must make an impassioned speech to the effect that he is far more use to them with his mind intact: he has observed Palpatine and Anakin at close quarters for many years, knows much that is useful and is one of the galaxy's top experts at hacking into other people's systems. Also he can lie through his teeth with a straight face. Organa, in immediate need of espionage resources, agrees.
(It's possible I've mentioned this before, but I'm too lazy to check. Nearly nine years of bloggy goodness will do that to you.)
You will feel weird and potentially a little sad when I tell you that they're making a live-action movie out of "Where the Wild Things Are". I think that's normal.
Then I will tell you that Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) is directing a script he co-wrote with Dave Eggars, and then show you the trailer. I have Hope, and I didn't even mention some of the voices used for the wild things (Lauren Ambrose, Forrest Whitaker, Chris Cooper, James Gandolfini). It's obvious they've expanded the plot a bit, but with those two on the screenplay it seems likely they've kept the spirit of the thing.
Go watch World Builder, a 10-minute short by Bruce Branit about a strange man who builds a holographic world for the woman he loves. It's beyond cool.
Meshugene Men:
CollegeHumor is notoriously hit or miss, but this trio of deeply inappropriate DirecTV ads deliciously skewers the "let's edit a classic movie for a commercial" trope.
(Edgar in particular should not miss the third example, which is definitely NSFW.)
John Scalzi has the funniest photo comment on the ending change we've yet seen. Spoilery, obviously.
Saturday Morning Watchmen should NOT be missed. Someone should show this to Alan Moore. The in-jokes are absolutely fantastic, but they're spoilery so I won't comment on them here.
The same actress played John Wayne's kid sidekick in True Grit and John Cusak's mom in Better Off Dead.
He's hard at work on Treme, set in New Orleans, and has already cast Wire vets Clarke Peters (Lester) and Wendell Pierce (Bunk; Pierce is a New Orleans native). Steve Zahn is also said to be in talks to star, with Deadwood alum Kim Dickens (Joanie Stubbs) along as love interest.
But that doesn't make this trailer for Mel Gibson's new movie any less funny:
Some years ago, I had a strange dream wherein I was living in a Cicely, Alaska, type town in the middle of the northwestern wilderness, and part of the quirky charm of the area was the intelligent moose population -- but part of the tension of the dream was that, unbeknownst to the population at large, the moose were under predation by some vampiric influences, resulting in a near-complete conversion of the moose population from "herbivore" to "blood-drinker."
Yeah. No idea.
Anyway, a discussion of this dream later made me realize that while vampiric moose are funny, the whole idea of a weremoose was enough to send me into beverage-spewing hysterics, and indeed is making me giggle even as I type this. Which is why seeing this prop over at Io9 makes me want to see this movie so very much.
The film -- Black Sheep -- centers on a young man with a horrible phobia of sheep returning to his ancestral New Zealand ranch to sell his share to his brother. Unbeknownst to our hero, the black-hearted brother has been experimenting on the sheep, turning the docile little buggars into bloodthirsty carnivores whose bite -- you guessed it! -- turns humans into bloodthirsty were-sheep. Madcap hilarity must, of course, ensue.
I Am Not Making This Up.
Who's with me?
I didn't know this until just now, but Groundhog Day is almost certainly a stolen film; the plot first surfaced in a 1973 short story called 12:01 PM, wherein the loop is only an hour long, and the only one aware of it is a sad-sack businessman.
The story was then made into a 1990 Academy-Award winning short film far, far more disturbing than the Bill Murray classic. A subsequent TV movie expanded the idea to a full day.
The author and 1990 director brought suit, apparently, but were unable to compete legally with the essentially limitless resources of Columbia Pictures.
The good news is that the 1990 film is available on Youtube, split into 3 parts (total running time is 25 minutes). The protagonist is played by an actor you will find familiar.
I somehow ended up watching all four hours of the horrible TV adaptation of XIII last Sunday and last night, and boy am I sorry.
Here's the main problem: XIII was a very well-received graphic novel first, over in Belgium of all places. It then made the leap into an interesting first-person shooter whose charm was enhanced by the fact that it was done not in a photorealistic style, but instead as though the player were playing the comic. Nice idea, and apparently well-executed.
Well, here comes the nearly inevitable film adaptation, clearly shot on the cheap with has-been (as in "has-been MUCH THINNER before now") Val Kilmer in a bit part, and Stephen Dorff as the eponymous XIII.
And it's bad. Really bad. Granted, there probably hasn't been a decent plotline yet that actually works well in all three formats (game, comic, TV) because of the various demands and quirks of each medium, so they definitely get SOME slack for taking a swing at it. And there were parts that weren't awful, but on the whole the entire affair ran on rails, telegraphing twists well before they happened. Plus, since it needed to anchor two evenings, it felt super-bloated at four hours (well, minus commercials). Add to this the fact that the plot of Shooter is basically the same thing, but in a much better movie, and you get some annoyance.
However, the single greatest area this steamer fails is in preventable problems clearly the result of a complete disregard for verifiable facts. To wit:
One scene, said to be "the day before election day," or early November, shows Arlington National Cemetery under a few inches of snow. Snow that early in or around the District would be freakish and weird, and while not unprecedented, is still out of place here.
Compounding the error, though, is the very next shot of the film, which shows a lush and verdant White House lawn. Trees are full of leaves, the sky is blue, and there's no hint of winter. Um, what? News flash to filmmakers: The White House is only about two miles from Arlington, dumbasses.
In another shot displaying a willful ignorance of basic DC geography, a phone call placed from "a pay phone in Dupont Circle" shows the caller with a clear view of the Capitol down a wide boulevard. Leaving aside for a moment the basic problem -- the Capitol isn't visible from Dupont -- the view provided OF the Capitol is from the east, and Dupont is northwest.
A plotpoint of the film is a presidential race between a successor Vice President and the opposite-party candidate, who happens to be the assassinated President's brother. That's a little weird, but here's the really fun part: a political ad we see in the film claims that the Vice President "as governor of Illinois voted to cut funding for the Marines." Um, what?
A late-film development is the deployment of a dirty bomb at a Bethesda polling station on election day, as a way to allow the government to impose martial law and disrupt the electoral process. This opens the door for a twofer of stupidity. First, we see elaborate, TSA-style security measures at the polling station, which have never been in place any time I've voted anywhere.
The real screamer, though, is that (according to dialog in the film) DC suburb Bethesda, Maryland is "four hours from DC." That's some metro line, isn't it?
Compare all this to the slavish attention to real-world geography shown by the Fallout 3 team on a video game.
Sigh. It's what I get for watching a broadcast network, really. If NBC/CBS/ABC/Fox ever get something decent on the air, it's got to be a complete accident.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles is back from an extended hiatus, and is the lead-in show to Joss Whedon's new Dollhouse. However, collisions being what they are, we're grabbing the Terminator stuff with the TV and getting DH online.
Except Fox has TSCC scheduled from 7:00 to 8:01, which makes it a PITA to tape TSCC and then grab something else on another channel at 8. It also means that even if you rig up a manual recording for TSCC, you miss the last minute or two of the show. This is clearly a ploy to drive viewers to Dollhouse, but it's a cheesetastic dick move even if it is in service of a show creator we Heathen enjoy (Whedon).
Well, fuck you, Fox. And to think they wonder why people torrent TV; crap like this makes it objectively simpler to just download than it is to watch normally. (And, seriously, fuck Fox's busy-as-shit halfass view-online site. It's fallen down on me too many times to bother with anymore when I can get an HD torrent to watch without wrestling with browser plug-ins and net congestion.)
Seriously, what could be more awesome than Zombie Nazis?
Full trailer at the official site; the tagline is, of course, "Ein, Zwei, DIE!"
